W H Auden quotes

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Now is the age of anxiety.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

Now is the age of anxiety.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.